Thursday, August 6, 2009

Birch had his friend Michael over for a sleep-over last night. Michael is a Good Kid. He listens when you tell him something, is polite, eats what you serve him and makes sparkling conversation for a 9-year-old boy. Plus he always wears a black fedora...like every day. Sheesh. How adorable. No complaints here for him.

However, I do have complaints about MY kid who morphs into some sort of deranged, moody Yeti creature whenever his friends come over. His manners deteriorate until he is ape-like, he gets smart-mouthed and pushy, he whines more, begs more, wheedles more and generally gets on my nerves more. Ugh. Can you fire your own kid? If so, he is totally fired.

Part of it is the fact that they stay up so late and get up so damned early (what's up with that? I remember doing that and I still can't fathom why...at what point is it that we started to cherish sleep...i can't remember that either...). This, I reason exhausts them and makes their emotions a bit raw. Then there's the sugar thing...

I'm not big on feeding kids sugar. He gets more than his share, but mainly because he is an amazing opportunist and takes advantage of the fact that I am often distracted with work or the baby to grab extra helpings of whatever sweets are available. But today...(((sigh)))...okay, brace yourselves...this story is classic....

I took the boys to the movies. The baby will NOT sit still for a movie, so I get them seated and give them $5 to buy "popcorn and anything else they need" knowing that popcorn is $2 each and water is provided free. They said popcorn was what they wanted, so i figure the worst they can do is get a candybar to share between them...this I can handle. So, then I take the baby outside to walk around, etc. and later I find out that instead of getting popcorn, they used the money to buy 5 - $1 candy bars!!!!! AND...this is the best part...Michael doesn't like candy that much, so my son ate 4 of the candy bars...by himself!!!

Can you imagine this??? Can you imagine eating 4 normal sized snickers, m&m's or whatever...ALL AT ONCE??? He didn't even act hyper afterwards. It's spooky, really.

I love sweets, personally, but even I am dumbfounded by this. Is he some sort of sugar mutant? How does his body process it all? really.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

I'm clearly quite insane. Evidence: This past weekend I took The Boy and The Baby on a 2-day trip to Boston for my good friend's wedding. By myself.

Actually, I must still cling to some remnant of sanity because I opted out of the 24-hour long drive (visions of Veda shrieking from the bondage of her carseat for miles and endless miles....Birch asking every 30 seconds "are we there yet?") and I decided to break out the old credit card for some plane fare.

In retrospect, the travel part wasn't too bad...compared to something like 12 hours of back labor or getting your wisdom teeth removed with no painkiller. Veda had been getting her eye teeth the whole week before, which meant about 6 nights of screaming (Veda screaming, me crying) and no sleep, but thankfully she seemed to come out of it by the time we left.

We had to drive 2-1/2 hours to Charlotte for the flight, so I decided to spend the night before the trip at my friends' house in Cornelius to break up the travel time a little. That was fun. We drank wine and at homemade pizza the night before...stayed up a bit late and drank a bit too much wine, but hey, you only live once.

Anyway, we lucked out on the flight up...even with a stupid layover in D.C., we had no delays (what are the odds?) and the kids were great. Birch was super-helpful and Veda traveled like a pro. Thank goddess for my Ergo. Can't imagine doing the trip without it.

The wedding was so cool...Daryl (mi amigo from way, way back) is Japanese-American and grew up in Hawaii and his bride Becky is Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. So what we had was a wedding with Jewish klezmer band (accordian and all), leis, paper cranes, an aikido demonstration, singing in Hebrew and a rousing round of "banzai" at the end of the reception. They held it at a pre-Revolutionary War era farm in the Berkshires and it was just fantastically beautiful...flowers, flowers, everywhere.

And bonus...I even saw (or experienced) a ghost when I was upstairs in the old farmhouse nursing the baby. It was so freaky...it was just me and Veda up there in this incredibly old house full of antiques. It was totally quiet and really, really hot. We went into a bedroom and I locked the door with a bolt lock so Veda couldn't run out of the room and onto the stairs. We sat down on an antique sofa and I had just whipped out a boob, when the bolt flew up and the door slammed open. It startled me because I thought somebody was coming into the room (even though it was bolted from the INSIDE...duh!) but there was NOBODY THERE!!!! Yeah. Veda laughed. I sat there nervously for about 10 seconds, then we got up and left.

So, now we're home...exhausted but happy. It was a fun trip. And now that I've done it, I'm ready to do it again. Hey...maybe if I come into some money I can go back to my globe-trotting road rat ways...this time with babies in tow. :-)